Lawyers love a good website... add a few nice visuals to the home page, post some pictures from a recent event at the firm, include your partners' bios and add a couple of legal updates regarding the latest changes in legislation and that's the job done... or is it?
If that’s what you would like from your website, no problem, we can do that for you - just get in touch and we can start today!
STOP!
Perhaps this all sounds too much and it’s just a cleverly disguised attempt to make a slick sales pitch to redesign your website?
Before we go any further let’s take things back a bit and ask a pretty fundamental question,
Which of the following answers apply?
Presuming the fact you are reading this blog on how inbound marketing for solicitors can generate leads, is because you would like to be in the fourth category but just don't know how to do it?
Don't worry if your answer was 1, 2 or 3, because we're about to show you how to generate leads from your law firm website using inbound marketing.
The first trick is to stop thinking about what YOU want to say and start thinking about what it is your audience wants to hear.
Inbound marketing for solicitors is a relatively new concept in marketing and at its core it is pretty much common-sense. Instead of interrupting your audience and trying to force them to do business with you because you say you are great, inbound marketing at your law firm should be about understanding your audience, earning their attention and then converting these into leads through interesting and relevant content that addresses their particular problems and issues.
The main steps you need to take include:
There is no hard sell here!
An important point to remember is that everyone is at a different point in their journey to become a client of your law firm. You don't know what knowledge they already have or how serious they are about employing a law firm... never mind yours!
Each lead is a person at the end of the day and no matter how big the company is that they work for, they are still a person and they will need to satisfy their own requirements as they research solutions for the problems and challenges they face.
We typically see three main stages in a buyer's journey on their way to becoming a law firm client.
The important point to consider is that everyone travels through the buyer’s journey at different speeds. Some people will move through it in a day, others like to consider their options and work through at their own pace. For this reason you need to have content focussed on all three stages of the buyer’s journey on your website in order to cater for different visitors to your website who may be at each of these different stages.
Publishing content for each stage of the Buyer’s Journey will help you to appear more relevant to your audience and will also help to drive conversions into leads. The best way to do this is to have different types of offer for each type of content.
We don’t mean an actual offer to do business, we mean a Content Offer, such as an eBook or a White Paper for each stage of the Buyer’s Journey.
eBooks and White Papers work well for the Awareness and Consideration stages, whilst comparisons and case studies work well at the Decision stage.
You will want to add each lead to an email workflow which will nurture them with a series of automated emails to help them through their journey until they are ready to get on a call or meet with you to find out more about becoming a client.
By understanding your audience, the pains they suffer and providing them with the content which address these pains for the three main stages of the buyer’s journey, you will be well positioned to attract the right visitors to your website and convert them into leads.
Not bad for a humble law firm website which was previously languishing without much love or engaging content for so long. By taking a strategic approach and thinking deeply about what it is your target audience wants and refocusing your content "on them" instead of your firm, you will suddenly have a law firm website which stands out from the rest and even better than this, your website will be generating new leads and generating revenue for your firm.
If you like this blog, please feel free get in touch. You may also like to read our free guide, "How To Generate Leads From Your Law Firm Website" to get into more detail on how your practice can actually start to take an inbound approach to your law firm marketing.